Now it’s time to see how a city is built. I have a few friends and neighbors who were heavily involved in the creation of the new city and I will be working with them over the next few months to figure out how this whole shin-dig is going to play out.

I see from the BrookhavenYes site, that the city begins operation on December 17th of this year. Presumably there is a ton of work to be done when trying to create a new government from scratch.

Between now and then, I have a few questions that I would like to have addressed:

What about the budget? Who makes it? Who approves it? How is it balanced?

What about taxes? I’m told that they will be low (3.35 mils), but why do we think we can run a government with lower tax revenue than any other government?

What about the big three? Atlanta’s three biggest problems are transportation, water, and education. What are we doing as a new city to address those?

Where will town hall be? Where will any of the Brookhaven government buildings be?

What is the election structure? Who are we electing and when do we elect them to plan this party?

When do all these new policemen start patrolling?

What about zoning? I’m familiar with the Brookhaven-Peachtree Overlay District and its zoning requirements, but what will this new animal want in new developments?

A decent resource for new residents of Brookhaven

While you ponder those vexing queries, here are a few resources for you to conduct your own research.

“It’s not how far you fall but how high you bounce that counts” -Zig Ziglar

Fine. I’ll admit it. I’m addicted to the Olympics.

I LOVE watching our country compete in anything and the Olympics create this unique, high-tension environment where everyone is watching and Gold is on the line.

Say what you want abut NBC, they are dominating my DVR right now. (I recorded the weight-lifting championships yesterday!)

I even get into Women’s Gymnastics.

Yep.

I’m a 27-year-old, testosterone-filled meat-head and I like watching our girls flip around on balance beam, uneven bars, vault, and floor routine. Don’t judge me. Blame it on Kerri Strugg. I was 12 when she stuck that vault in ’96 a few miles away from where I was sitting. I’ve watched ever since.

So, it should come as no surprise that I was watching this past weekend and I was watching last night when our girls, the so-called Fab Five, were competing. I’m not a sports reporter and I know a little-more-than-nothing about Gymnastics (I’m 6 foot freaking 7), so I will leave the details and superlatives to the experts.

What I do know is courage and toughness.

It’s the double-edged sword of sports that we can see the best and worst about us. You can know some of the most extreme highs and intense lows through competition, and sometimes they happen in the same week.

Enter Jordyn Wieber.

Wieber, as I am told, is the defending world champion in the individual competition. In my basic understanding of the sport, that means she is the best all-around gymnast on the planet.

In the Olympics, girls compete on the team level and individual level. Their qualifying scores from this weekend determined who would qualify for the individual finals and which teams would qualify for the team finals. Through a quirk of the Olympic rules, only two girls from any one country can qualify for the individual finals. So, even if the U.S. has 4 of the top 5 gymnasts on the planet (which I am told is true this year) only two of the four can qualify for the individual finals in the Olympics.

Again, I will leave the drama and sportscasting to the pros, but Wieber ended up placing third or fourth of all girls and two other Americans placed ahead of her.

The reigning world champion did not qualify for the individual finals.

NBC made sure to get a ton of close-ups of her sobbing into her hands as soon as she learned she wouldn’t qualify and in one particularly torturous shot they showed the U.S. teammate that beat her in the foreground as she was crying in the background. (Sometimes I think you have no soul, NBC.)

But Wieber’s Olympics weren’t over. She still needed to compete for the team title for the U.S.

Long story short, she did so last night and led our girls to their first gold medal since the aforementioned Strugg killed it in ’96. She was terrific. She was the team leader and maybe the best performer in the gym last night in London. Knowing that all personal accolades were gone and any individual medals were hopeless, she still went out and crushed it and led our country to a gold medal.

Cool story. Queue the epic music. Wave the flag. And so on.

Yeah, I was proud of her and proud of my country. But more than that, I was motivated. Whatever Wieber has inside of her, I want that.

You may wonder what Olympics gymnastics has to do with commercial property in Atlanta.

Well, you may have noticed that the last 5 or so years in our economy haven’t been so great. We aren’t exactly sailing smoothly. Some of the greatest names in our business in the last 20 years have retired, gone bankrupt, or just folded and drifted away.

We are an industry that literally built the city of Atlanta. Yeah, we have Coke, Home Depot, UPS, and some other cool businesses here. But, at our heart, we are a commercial real estate city. We led all major U.S. cities in growth over the last 10 years (prior to ’08-’09).

Our industry was home to the leaders and innovators in a great city heading for great things.

Then 2008 came along. We got hit. We got black eyes. We lost momentum, time, and money.We lost chances at greatness. No doubt about it.

But if little Jordyn Wieber can find the strength and courage to do what she did last night, why can’t we?

Ours is a city filled with brilliant and talented people who have all been hurt by this Great Recession. Some of us have wanted to sulk into a corner and cry (and some of us have).

But, you know what?

The sun came up this morning. Today is a new day. Tomorrow is full of promise.

And we still have something worth fighting for.

This is a great city with a bright future and I’m excited to see where we can go. We have our issues to work out and demons to overcome, but we can be great and we just need another chance to show it.

Maybe you went bankrupt. Maybe you damaged your reputation. Maybe some great relationships have come to an end. Maybe you lost your life savings. Maybe some dreams died.

Cry. Get upset. Get angry.

And then move on.

We have some great things we still need to do around here, and our teammates need us to step up.

So, here is a toast to Jordyn Wieber and a toast to all of us. She showed us what we all need to do after a crushing blow. Move on, keep competing, and act like the best.

Our second question about TSPLOST is whether the DOT can get the job done on time and on budget.

If I were hiring a contractor for a job, I would obviously want to do some background checking, get references, and see past work. If I am going to decide that Atlanta should spend several billion dollars on 150 projects around the city, I want to do the same diligence on the Department of Transportation.

Is the DOT going to get job done on time and on budget?

Well, I have watched this project improving the Peachtree Rd corridor from Piedmont to Peachtree Dunwoody. They seem to be doing fine, but doesn’t it seem like it has taken about twice as long as it should? I don’t remember the exact timeline for the project, but it has been several years to add a simple median with some plants.

I also remember the project at Roxboro and E Paces. What did that take? Like 10 years?

Or the widening of Abernathy from Roswell to Johnson Ferry? That’s been about 5 years and I still see orange cones.

400 was supposed to stop tolling me when it was paid for. It got paid off a couple years ago . . . . I still pay. (I know Governor Deal claimed this would stop at the end of next year, but I am still paying right now.)

I guess the moral is that I trust the DOT about as far as I can throw them. I know there are thousands of reasons for delays, setbacks, and cost overruns and maybe my expectations are too high. But I work in the CRE business. Construction is a little hobby of mine. We seem to get our stuff done on time and on budget.

Having said all that, this TSPLOST vote is supposed to keep the money with the Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission and is also requiring the creation of a Citizen Review Panel to oversee progress of the projects. (Scott Selig wrote a decent article including these two entities here.) I have no idea who is selected to be on these two special groups or what “power” they will have.

For example, if the DOT runs late on improving the 400 and 285 interchange, what will the Citizen Review Panel do about it? Will they write scathing letter?

Good . . . now I feel better about the hundreds of millions of dollars we allocated there.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

The DOT’s track record is against it.

Fine, then they are doing something to increase the accountability.

Good idea. Did they go far enough?

Meh . . . . maybe.

I’d call this one a wash. I think they are trying to do more to hold the DOT to budgets and timelines, but decades of history are working against them.

So let’s call this is solid “Maybe”.

On to our final thoughts on TSPLOST Monday before the big vote Tuesday.

I guess this is what rush hour will look like if we pass TSPLOST . . .

As part of our ongoing discussion on the Transportation Special Purpose Local-Option Sales Tax, or TSPLOST, referendum up for vote on July 31, let’s take a minuet to dig a little deeper into these projects on the proposed list.

We previously looked at a list of the projects proposed based on a map found at UntieAtlanta.com. Using that map, I counted 147 projects (some of the literature claims 157, but we are cloe enough to make some generalizations) spread across 10 metro counties. I am fully admitting that I may not have ALL of the information on this referendum, but I think I have MOST of it and that should be good enough to get a general sense of what is being proposed. If anyone knows of a more comprehensive or accurate resource than the ones I have used for my data-gathering, please let me know in the comments and I can update!

So, as we are trying to figure out whether this initiative will actually alleviate some of the traffic burdens of the metro area, let’s take a deeper look at the projects, their budgets, and noticeable trends.

The firs thing I notice is how spread out these projects are. I was under the impression that this was an Atlanta initiative. This looks more to me like an Atlanta MSA initiative with projects in every major suburban area (except the Panthersville/SE Atlanta corridor, interestingly).

This handy pdf from Georgia Trend shows a quick breakout of the projects by region as follows:

North Fulton – $384,900,000

Northeast – $898,950,000

East – $67,300,000

Henry County & Southeast – $213,000,000

Clayton County & South – $313,170,000

Southwest – $196,860,000

Douglas & Westside – $332,860,000

Downtown & Midtown – $601,892,477

City of Atlanta – $134,332,592

Dekalb Projects – $185,250,000

Total – $3,328,515,069

A few things that stand out when looking at these numbers.

The City of Atlanta is getting about $740 Million. That’s about $140 Million less than Gwinnett County.

Is anyone else surprised that the largest number is going to Gwinnett? What does that say about our transportation priorities?

Having said that, our last post had $112 Million going toward improving MARTA, so I suppose that could be counted toward in-town funds. But that is STILL less than is being spent in Gwinnett.

Gimme more stop lights!

While we are on the topic, why am I paying for upgrades to MARTA? I don’t see any new branches being developed or neighborhoods being reached by our rapid transit. So why am I sending money to MARTA to update their elevators, ventilation , passenger notifications, etc? Doesn’t MARTA have it’s own budget?

Am I paying to bail out MARTA?

As far as the in-town stuff goes, you know I love the Beltline and think it’s a great draw for bringing people to the city.

I notice we are fixing some bridges downtown. Hmmmm. I also notice that our road projects in town seem to be cheaper than the suburban surface road improvements. Maybe that’s because some of those suburban improvements are widenings, but it seems odd that most of our road improvements are a couple hundred thousand dollars and most of the suburban deals are a couple million.

From my list, I counted a total of 82 projects that I opposed and 65 projects that I supported. That’s closer than I expected, but I still oppose more than I support.

All told, we are proposing to spend approximately $2,407,040,000 in the suburbs and $1,033,475,069 in town (I am including the Dekalb and MARTA stuff as in town).

So, in a city whose culture has been decimated by sprawl, we are proposing to fix our transportation issues by spending more than twice as much money on suburban projects as in town projects?

Hmmmmm . . . . maybe I am missing something.

What else did you readers notice? Any trends or special projects of interest that stood out as you were trying to wrap your head around this massive proposition?

Now that we have gone through what is in this deal, check back this week for an analysis of whether the DOT can pull this off.

Now that we have a quick guide to the projects proposed on TSPLOST, let’s take a couple posts to answer the basic questions on TSPLOST that will help us figure out exactly what we are voting for on July 31st.

Specifically, let’s try to answer these:

What is it? – What projects are involved and what money is being allocated where? (This will be a follow up to our Quick Guide)

How Realistic Is it? – Can the DOT pull this huge project off in the timeline? It doesn’t matter how cool it sounds if the DOT can’t pull it off . . .

What specific problems will be solved? – I know we all want to Untie Atlanta. How will these projects do that?

What happens if it doesn’t pass? – Do we sink into a traffic-choked oblivion? Can we try again next year?

Given our future hope and dreams for the city, is this the best course of action?

Alright. That seems like a decent road map (pun!) that should get us to a “yes” or “no.” Check back over the next week or two as we will try to answer these questions as thoroughly as possible and get some debate moving on whether TSPLOST will truly untie Atlanta traffic.

If someone tells you they’re a sustainability consultant, or expert, your reaction should be to ask, “in what industry?”

The reason I say this is because sustainability is not a profession with a defined industry, it’s a specialization. It’s similar to being a lean manufacturing expert or a talent acquisition consultant. They’re both specializations within larger industries i.e. manufacturing and human resources. Sustainability is a skill set within a large realm of thinking, much like creative writing would be to grammar. However, the realm that sustainability exists in is a strange mix of management consulting, environmental analysis, and politics. It’s tough to really pin down.

Sustainability has become a leviathan-like specialization because you can apply its principles to nearly everything, which is good. But, what makes it dangerous is that you can tie everything you analyze back to some life threatening environmental hazard. This is the sustainability marketing technique used to grab your attention and then reel you in. Everyone is worried about their health and well-being, so of course everyone worries about the world becoming uninhabitable. This is why I say most of what you hear coming from sustainability experts, most often entrepreneurs cashing in, is lies or damned lies. They’re just looking to get you worked up; ever heard of Al Gore?

It’s All Lies

Fossil fuels aren’t running out, the weather is different every year no matter what we do, and that Al Gore fellow is the only thing on this planet full of hot Green House Gas. That’s what you want to hear right? Well, all of those are all lies. Or are they? In fact, if you’re a sustainable thinker none of that matters. Are you confused yet? Good, because that’s exactly what I want.

Sustainability is just like statistics. There are lies, damned lies, and sustainability. Sustainability is an overly complicated opportunity cost methodology backed with statistical and environmental analysis, which is usually quite shoddy, used to confuse average people into feeling guilty so they spend more money. A common tactic used in sustainability is the butterfly effect.

If you don’t recycle, this puppy will die. How do you sleep at night? Don’t you feel guilty and want to spend some money on sustainable stuff.

“If you take that plastic bag from your grocer, you’re killing an endangered species in Namibia.”

You’ve either said something like this before or heard someone say it. Perhaps not to this extreme, but I bet it’s closer than you think. Arguing a point like my Namibia-Plastic-Bag-conundrum can be very effective if you’re dealing with an overly emotional audience, but in reality it’s almost impossible to actually prove. If you’re a statistician you’re familiar with the term “spurious relationship”. Just because two things are statistically related doesn’t mean they are causal. This is something sustainability speakers don’t want you to realize when they’re hammering home their point about how your poor choices are ruining the earth and more importantly our economy.

But, it’s not Sustainability’s Fault

There are two cold, hard truths here to consider: 1) We are terrible at global thinking and 2) we want all of our issues in life to be black and white. Neither are true.

We, as humans, are ill equipped for global thinking. Earth’s systems are far to complex for us to handle as individual thinkers. The reason climate change can’t be irrefutably proven is because climate models can’t predict all the factors affecting localized weather events. I use that example not to poke fun at climate scientists, but to illustrate that proving a butterfly effect is nearly impossible because Earth’s systems are so very complex.

All those things that happen outside our realm of understanding are called externalities. As an example, pollution is an externality in standard business decision making. We don’t really understand and can’t predict how pollution will affect a company’s ability to operate down the road. We can’t understand it, so we don’t use it in decision making.

So, Earth is difficult to understand and here’s the second truth. We like our answers to be 100% correct or 100% wrong. Grey areas are not our specialty. A former real estate mentor of mine had a great saying he used each time he entered a room to discuss a new deal with investors. This, for those uneducated, is that last place you want to be unsure of an outcome. He would say, “The numbers we’re going to show you today are incorrect and the financial result of this deal will not look like this. But, we’ve done our best to analyze the risk and we think we have a good one on our hands.”

And, he was right. The actual numbers never reflect our predictions because externalities are roughly impossible to predict (we don’t understand them, remember). He didn’t know it at the time, but that’s my favorite saying both for finance and also for questions of sustainability. He had a great understanding that life happens in the grey area.

“it seeks to define and analyze risk associated with externalities to improve long term decision making.”

Like the premise that there is no such thing as a free lunch, sustainable thinking seeks to show how costs add up on a grander scale. There will always be winners and losers no matter how anything is produced and sold. Sustainability attempts to reduce the number of unforeseen future losses caused by the winners today (there’s no accounting for the damage caused by Charlie Sheen however.) It’s pretty much impossible, but it’s worth trying. Not all of sustainable thinking is a lie and in fact I think it represents a new wave of analysis for capital investment. The hoopla created by greedy greenies seeking to make a quick buck makes proving the validity of that a bit more difficult.

Keep reading here to learn more about what environmental risks should be considered to improve our understanding of investment and economic development.

Today I ran across the UntieAtlanta.com site (link is here) and I think it’s a great resource to educate yourself about the TSPLOST vote coming up on July 31st.

It’s nice to have a quick and easy resource to show all of the projects and timing associated with this huge bill as I suspect most people are confused as to what exactly they will be voting for. My favorite part (and most educational) is the interactive map that places markers on all the projects and has brief descriptions of their timing and price.

As I mentioned before, there is no such thing as a perfect bill. There are parts that I agree with and parts that I disagree with. And I think it is important to point out the difference between doing “something” and doing the “right thing”. I know that action makes us all feel better, but action for action’s sake is a great way to go far in the wrong direction.

So my basic two questions for this bill are: 1) Is there more to like than dislike in this bill? and 2) Is this the right thing to do or just something to do to address our transportation issues?

I think the answer to #1 will tell me the answer to #2. And my answer to number one is actually very easy to figure out: Would I vote to send 1 cent out of every dollar I spend to go to fixing _______________? By breaking down TSPLOST piece-by-piece I can quantify how many of the projects I support and how many I oppose. If there are more that I support than I oppose, then I’m a “yes” on TSPLOST. If not, I basically have to figure out if the Beltline and other projects I view as crucial are worth all that money I don’t want to spend on the other projects.

And let me reiterate something I said last time.

WE NEED TO UPGRADE, IMPROVE, AND FIX ALL OF OUR TRANSPORTATION IF WE WANT TO CONTINUE TO GROW AS AN INTERNATIONAL CITY.

I don’t think that is open to debate. Atlanta will grow when people want to be here. People want to be here when they enjoy our quality of life. Our quality of life is highly tied to our ability to move in and around the city. Therefore transportation (along with water and eduction) is one of the crucial issues facing Atlanta in my lifetime. So, don’t think I underestimate the value of upgrading our transportation. And don’t think that I wish the suburban roads and transportation systems to fall into disrepair. I just want to make sure that this is the best long-term decision for our city before I throw my “yes” around.

Dang. 147 projects. We can get into how I voted and why a little later. For now, digest these projects a little. Go to the site and see which projects you like and don’t like.
Educate yourself and little and then let’s chat about this.

As a reminder, the way I determined my vote was by asking: Would I want to spend one cent of every dollar I spend on (insert project)?

So my answers are totally subjective and some are self-serving, but I will explain all of that later. For now, just look it over and tell me your initial thoughts below.

– Duke

p.s. If you want to follow my list on the map, I went from South to North starting in Griffin and Left (West) to Right (East).

p.p.s. Big thanks to the hard-working team at Untie Atlanta! This is a very cool and interesting map that should help us all make a more-informed decision.

Everyone seems to have an opinion, so I might as well throw my hat in the ring.

I think I like T-SPLOST overall, but I think it may be short-sighted. I think it’s apparent that we as a city have some transportation and traffic issues. What I question is whether or not this bill is the BET solution to some of those problems.

I was reviewing the major projects in TSPLOST in the business chronicle and I was struck by how many of them focused on suburban projects. I have no problem with the suburbs and I grew up there myself, but the opportunity cost of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the suburbs seems enormous.

95 out of 100 Gen Y workers (straw poll) are moving into the city limits (ITP). That’s millions of young people moving in-town as the future leaders and innovators in our city. That influx of people who live, drive, and work in-town is putting a huge strain on our aging transport and infrastructure.

Since Atlanta is a city built around the car, it’s imperative that we pay attention and create solid programs to address people moving into the city. If millions of people move into Rome or London or Paris, no big deal. The sidewalks are a little more crowded and RE prices rise to meet demand. But those cities were built around pedestrian traffic and you won’t see the same kind of gridlock that we deal with daily. In Atlanta, just about every person moving into the city is doing so with a car. So WE HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO COMMUTES.

For decades, Atlanta has been the poster child for urban sprawl and white-flight into the suburbs. Now that this trend is finally reversing and our best and brightest are moving back in town, why are we spending hundreds of millions of tax payers dollars on improving suburban transportation? Or, more to the point, why are we using money that we could use in-town on projects that make suburban living easier?

Can a fella get some light-rail?

Again, I have no problem with the suburbs and I’m from Gwinnett County. I understand that we need to maintain our transportation system. If it’s about to collapse, let’s fix it. But I would certainly rather spend $100 Million on improving our pathetic MARTA system (paint job, anyone?) than broadening some suburban freeway to six lanes. Those suburban projects are not bad projects or bad ideas, but there is only so much money to go around and every dime you spend in the suburbs is a dime you could be spending in town.

Maybe the simplest way I could put it is:Why are we spending so much money on our past (sprawl) at the expense of our future (in-town transit)?

And let me be clear on something. I am certainly not advocating that we abandon all transportation and infrastructure projects in the suburbs. The reason cities and counties have large budgets in maintenance is to keep the roadways safe and infrastructure current. If they can’t, then they need to find a way to reallocate the funds or people just need to move somewhere else. I just get bothered by the idea of Atlanta tax payers paying for Alpharetta roads. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think Alpharetta residents should pay for Alpharetta roads.

Much like people, bills are neither completely good or completely evil. There are good parts and bad parts. I LOVE the Beltline project and think it’s a great long-term investment for our city, but there are at least a half-dozen projects on this bill that I see as superfluous and costly to in-town residents.

So, the crux of the matter is that you have to convince me that the benefit of projects like the Beltline outweigh the superfluous spending on suburban projects. Show me why the good outweighs the bad in this particular version of the TSPLOST bill.